After we had stopped working on the guinea pen for the day, someone got a wild hair and decided to dance on the new platform -

Kristron – ‘We need to get out more.’

Me – ‘We are out more.  We’re all the way out back.’

In my line of life you have to embrace some level of hypocrisy.  Anarchism is an imperfect ideology, especially in day to day application.  In regards to food, we build momentum against industrial agriculture, monoculture, neocolonialism, global food distribution systems and chain grocery stores while building regional food systems, community gardens, CSAs, and cooking for Food Not Bombs.  I work on the latter all while relying heavily on the waste streams of the former.

The whole dichotomy came into focus (again) as I was hauling ten pounds of bananas out of the dumpster, taking in a nice and cozy 2600 mile diet subsidy.  We are building a farm with a focus on self sufficiency.  Since that goal is way off, we rely very heavily on the waste stream.

I have written about dumpster diving in the past, but the level of food and resource rescuing we do now is pretty unprecedented.  The chickens eat it (bananas and melons are their favorite), the goat eats it (cabbage trimmings are always available) and we all certainly do our part to go through as much of the food as we can.  The pigs are coming soon; they will eat whatever we other critters cannot get through.  Clothing, shelving, buckets, cardboard, wire, dishes, and a billion other things get converted into feeders, mulch and everyday farm equipment.

Artichokes, red peppers, starfruit, melons, red bananas, eggplant, avocado, asparagus – a sampling of the seasons from around the world, all held up by petroleum and horrible working conditions – picked, packed, shipped and then thrown away while still edible.  It is basically a punch in the face of all the work done … The wasteful practices are illustrated over an over again by the sight of good food going to the landfill.  But we intervene, daily, breaking the waste chain, feeding ourselves and others while the world dies around us.

Yesterday – in ten seconds in the grocery store dumpster – I pulled out an entire case of tomato sauce.  Twelve jars with an expiration date sometime in 2011, undamaged and unopened, thrown away simply because it was delivered to the wrong store.  So it gets thrown away.  Not donated, not given to employees, not sampled out.  If a punk wasn’t there to rescue it, it would be on its way to the landfill at this moment, the jars broken on the sides of the trash truck and contents stuck on the gears and plates and pieces of a wasteful world.

But if that waste stream stopped suddenly (like we want it to), our current food paradigm would change radically.  We are not yet growing enough to feed ourselves.  Entire subcultures are built on the availability of trashed food, websites and blogs are devoted to one thing only -

Every year in the US nearly 100 billion pounds of edible food are sent to landfills by retailers, restaurants, and consumers. It’s also estimated that only about 4 billion pounds of food would be necessary to eliminate hunger in America.

Don’t get me wrong, a huge pot of dumpster veggie soup is delicious, but with Trashy Gourmet I hope to show that dumpsters offer an endless array of options for your culinary delight. So start diving, get cooking, and stuff your face while you help save the world! Eating against capitalism tastes so good.

Can we eat our way out of capitalism?  Can we reconcile our goals with our current actions?  Pass me an avocado and we’ll talk about it later…

I like the way farming looks.  Not the cleared acres with unending rows; that bores me and makes my mouth a little sour.  I’m talking about the short rows and the squatting bodies, the hand seeding and pebble flicking.  It is intimate in a way that maybe only someone who is in it all the time can understand.

The Quitter book received a new review in the latest issue of Zine World (#27).

Quitter: Good Luck Not Dying: Compendium of the first five issues of Quitter zine, in a nice hand-sewn hardback, with dust jacket and stickers. Trace’s essays wander appealingly and wittily around, as he searches for something real in our cosmetic world. Issue #2 is the standout: Trace flies over the Midwest, musing over cultural impermanence. I liked this greatly, but however nice the book and stickers are, $19 is more than I would have paid for it.

Making books is not what I’m looking to do with my Spring and Summer.  It is more of a Winter project, a project that I failed with horribly this year.  I am behind on books – way behind.  If you ordered a book recently, you will get it within the next few weeks.

So I am again looking into getting the book printed in softcover, either through a self-publishing avenue or by a publisher wanting to run with it.  All options are open, but I simply can’t keep up with a hand made book…

If anyone out there knows of a publisher, is a publisher or just wants to help out, let me know.

I will continue to offer the paperback version as well as individual issues, but I am taking the hardcover version off the shelf.